Monday, August 27, 2012

Five reasons why astronomy is cool

It’s beautiful

If you go out on a dark moonless night,
you will immediately know what I mean. The Milky Way, stretching its
jagged course across the heavens, is quite a sight to behold. The
constellations, particularly the winter constellations, have an elegance
and familiarity to them. The Moon is also an appealing object, with its
ever changing phases and frequent conjunctions with other planets in
the sky. Through a small telescope, planetary disks, galaxies, nebulae
and open clusters come into view, often startling in their majesty.

Of course, the beauty of the universe is
not limited to what is immediately visible to our eyes. Deep space
objects, seen through the largest of telescopes, are candidates for some
of the most beautiful things ever seen by human eyes. Who could not
fail to be impressed by the wonderful Hubble photos of the Crab and
Eagle nebulas, or the views of the outer planets and moons from space
probes such as Voyager and Cassini? To see for yourself, each day NASA
publishes it’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. Few images ever fail to impress.

It’s extreme.

Nothing can be taken for granted about
space. Most of it is unimaginably cold, interspersed occasionally by
blisteringly hot stars with coronal temperatures of millions of degrees.
Almost everything is racing around at breakneck speed: barreling
through space at velocities of hundreds or thousands of kilometers a
second relative to us. That’s enough to cause quite an impact if we were
to get in their way. All around us catastrophic convulsions are taking
place, with vast explosions and unconscionably high energies. This is a
Universe of supernovas, neutron stars, magnetars, pulsars and Gamma Ray
Bursts – beams of high energy radiation that would eliminate all life on
our planet in an instant were our Earth unfortunate enough to stray too
close. Black holes exist that can compress the mass of whole stars into
volumes a few kilometers wide, creating gravitational fields that
nothing, not even light itself, can escape from.

This is the stuff of childhood fantasies.
Superpowers. Forcefields. Instantaneous death. The destruction of
worlds. It is no wonder that space features so prominently in the minds
of the young.

It ignites our curiosity.

Astronomy confronts us with some of the
biggest and most challenging problems about the nature of ourselves and
the fabric of reality. As a science, it has lead the way in overturning
ancient notions of how nature should behave. At one time we believed
ourselves to be at the centre of the Universe, with all objects,
including the Sun, revolving around the Earth. Astronomers through the
ages slowly revealed a different truth. Our star and our home planet are
among countless billions in a very ancient Universe. Everything we do
ultimately only affects an infinitesimally small piece of real-estate in
the cosmos. This discovery, while deeply humbling, is enlightening. It
tells us that we will never know everything. Our quest for knowledge is
unlimited. We are ants in a cathedral, and what a cathedral it is.

The study of the stars and planets has
pushed out the frontiers of knowledge in every direction. It’s
contribution to science and mathematics cannot be underestimated.
Without astronomy, the modern world as we know it would not exist.
Astronomy continues to confound us and guide us right to this day.
Gigantic accelerators are busy smashing sub-atomic particles into
smithereens to gain greater insights into the nature of matter because
objects in space do not always behave the way our current scientific
models expect them to. Astronomy has revolutionised our understanding of
nature and it will continue to do so.

It tells us about our past.

When you look into space, at any star you
care to mention, you are looking into history. You are not seeing the
star as it is now, but as it was when the photons of light left its
photosphere many years ago. If you can find the Andromeda Galaxy in the
sky, you are getting a picture of how it looked two million
years ago, long before humans ever roamed our planet. The largest
telescopes can see back billions of years ago, to galaxies in their
infancy, still in the process of being formed.

History is about ourselves, how we got
here, why things are how they are. Astronomy opens history even further
by explaining the origins of our planet, our sun, our galaxy – even
providing insights into our Universe and how it all started some 13 odd
billion years ago.

Astronomy is fascinating even when applied
to our own modest human story. We have had an intense relationship with
the stars and planets for thousands of years. It guided the ancient
cycles of sowing and harvesting. It provided the raw material for belief
systems, rituals and religions. It contributed to our language. It
assisted with navigation and discovery. In living memory, we have
witnessed men walking on the Moon and robot probes being flung out of
the solar system – events likely to be celebrated for millennia to come.
Our relationship with the stars has shaped the culture of today.

It’s our future.

Astronomy is important to our future, from
the short term to the distant long term. Over the coming decades,
private companies will take over much of the heavy lifting formerly
associated with government agencies such as NASA and ESA. This will
create new jobs and new wealth. Bigger telescopes and better equipment
will provide insights into reality that will stretch our technological
capabilities. Over the coming centuries perhaps we will explore and
colonise deep space for ourselves, using technologies yet undreamt of.
In the end, billions of years from now, our sun will expand, frying
everything on this planet before diminishing in size itself, its fuel
spent, its job done.

Perhaps there is a large asteroid or comet
out there in space with our name on it. Perhaps our planet will
eventually turn against us, forcing us to find a new home. Perhaps we
will find a way to cross the enormous gulfs separating us from other
stars in our galaxy. All of these possibilities lead us to the
conclusion that the stars will feature prominently in the future of the
human race.

Astronomy is available to all, from the
small child with his toy rocketship, to the octogenarian peering through
her telescope at a crater on the Moon. Few endeavours are so wide in
scope, so rich in detail, or so marvelous in implication. I invite you
to join in.